I am planning on a AScript studio application. (A simple calculator that retreives variables from an XML file)
I searched macscripter and found these 2 scripting additions
XML Lib and XML tools from latenightSW.com and smilelabs.com
My question is
If perl has an XML parser and if perl can return values to applescript, wouldnt the perl parser be faster than the Applescript scripting additions?
Also, some time ago Apple posted an article or keynote XML (APXL) and the article uses java code to parse the .apxl file.
Does this mean that the applescript’s XML parsers are less reliable than Java?
I would say XMLLib is the better of the two. Other options are System Events’ XML Suite (10.4+) and NSXMLParser (via ‘call method’).
Maybe (a lot depends on what you need to do), but whatever advantage you get from writing part of your code in Perl would be lost in bridging it with AppleScript via ‘do shell script’, which is slow and clumsy and only suitable for non-interactive batch processing operations.
If you need to do heavy data crunching and Perl is your thing, I’d suggest writing the entire application in Perl using PerlObjC or CamelBones instead of Studio. Otherwise, just do everything in AppleScript+Studio using XMLLib/System Events/NSXMLParser.